Wikis--a disruptive innovation – Cindy Gordon

Last week I wrote about wikis at work at Novell and Motorola. Here is an excellent wiki article, Wikis--a disruptive innovation, in the June issue KM World by my friend Cindy Gordon, CEO of Helix Commerce. She offfers a definiton of disruptive by author Clayton Christensen, - “where products or systems create new markets. Disruptive innovation patterns are difficult to see because they are complex and diffuse more rapidly.”

Cindy finds wikis falling into this category. She notes that in 2004, Gartner predicted that "a third of mainstream collaboration software products will support wiki-style interaction by 2006” and adds that Microsoft's fall release of Sharepoint will include wiki functionality. There are a number of examples of wikis use in financial servcies frims such as Bank of America and Citicorp. Other non-IT firms covered include Glaxo Smith Kline and West Toronto Support Services, a health services frim. I wrote about the wiki use of Novell and Motorola last week. Wikis use is growing behind the firewall and I agree with Cindy’s prediction that wikis will be a disruptive innovation.